About

I am a seasoned technical leader who pays a lot of attention
to enterprise patterns, methodologies, communities and (everyone’s)
personal development: with 10 years of experience on my back, I’ve
heavily focused my attention to agile practices,
patterns of enterprise application architecture,
leading mid-sized development teams and managing complexity in distributed systems.

I am a forward-thinker by nature and I still love to get my hands dirty with code, or testing new platforms: I am quite active on github and, from time to time,
blog over here.

I’m currently in Dubai, where I work as CTO @ Namshi, a Rocket Internet venture, leading our engineering team in developing our distributed, stateless microservice-based architecture: I am very proud of what we achieved in the past 6 years together, since we refactored our platform to become a SOA using the best of the tech ecosystem (ie. NodeJS, Docker, ReactJS, Golang, Redis) and the cloud (AWS & Google’s Kubernetes among others).
I spend most of my time trying to innovate our stack with tools like Docker or React, taming the implicit complexity of a large scale distributed system and helping our team members adopt new tools, practices and patterns they have never used before, like 12-factor apps, containers or ChatOps.

I’m a big supporter of microservices, the REST architectural style, asynchronous messaging systems and I’m used to work with some practices of extreme programming (and agile development, in general), like TDD and pair-programming.

I have been involved in projects for governments, mainstream companies
such as Samsung or Nissan and pioneered the technology scene of
e-commerce platforms in the Middle East: when I’m not working, you
can find me speaking at some conference (I like to travel around the
globe to share my experience at conferences and to hear about new and
disruptive technologies / platforms), blogging or grabbing a bite
in the old side of Dubai.

I always try to make a positive impact in the organizations I
work at, both from a technical and interpersonal perspective;
some of the feedback that I received includes:

Alex is the rare gifted engineer who is also a caring and effective leader.
While he is happiest immersed in engineering and design problems, he cares deeply about his team and directly invests in their development and effectiveness
in order to grow a high performance team.
For most of the 6 years that we worked together Alex’s role didn’t leave much time for programming during the week as he was working with his team and
stakeholders, but he had a penchant for disappearing over the weekend and coming back with a beautifully engineered solution to a particularly tricky problem
we were facing.
On a personal level, Alex is always a pleasure to be around and lightens the mood even in the most trying of circumstances. Alex would be a great addition to
any organization!

Hisham Zarka, Managing Director @ Namshi (2019)

Alex is “The” most motivated person I’ve ever dealt with throughout my entire career!
Having him as a manager and a mentor was an absolute privilege, he’s inspired an exceptional growth in myself and within my teammates.
Fostered a progressive environment with aggressive eagerness to learn, grew and helped the business thrive, leading a team to build one of the most efficient and best-performing e-commerce platforms in the Middle East, yet maintaining a relaxed work-friendly atmosphere.
Technically, I never saw him settle for a subpar solution if something better can be done. And a big part of his technical excellence is that he never stops playing with new technologies, reading books or he is in an event on the other side of the world sharing learnings and experience.
His advocacy for methodologies and concepts like microservices, domain-driven development and cutting down the last 10ms from that endpoint, is what I see the perfect tale for a CTO pushing the business potentials even more and keeping the tech-stalk solid, shiny and a delight to work with

Mohamed Amin, Senior Frontend Engineer @ Namshi (2018)

I had the pleasure of working with Alessandro since the early stages of Namshi,
before it became the most successful fashion e-commerce in the Middle-East.
There is no doubt that Alessandro played a key role in the success of Namshi.
Thanks to his forward thinking and leadership, we were able to quickly create
and modify an ecommerce platform that fulfills the business needs, with a very
small tech team (compared to the market). Other than being a great product
oriented professional, he can rapidly choose the right tools for the job,
even if it is a new product or technology, mentor the team and also feed a
developer’s willing-to-learn/willing-to-try desires.
It is very difficult nowadays find someone that has great skills from the
business, technical and leadership point of view, but Alessandro has all of
them. His motto, “keep things simple”, is something that I will definitely
keep in mind every time I have to tackle a tech challenge.

Alessandro Cinelli, Head of Backend Engineering @ Namshi (2016)

I have been privileged to have good managers but Alex stands above.
He is one of the most complete leaders I have seen. His attributes
are countless from unique ways of motivating the team to being a
great communicator. His unique way of delegating tasks as well
giving the team the flexibility is incomparable. As VP, he still
likes to get his hands dirty with codes. Its a great joy and pride
to be working with him.

Oluwaseun Obajobi, Lead system administrator @ Namshi (2014)

I can’t even imagine how Namshi and its development team would look
like if we did not hire Alessandro as Lead Developer.
It is like with Samuel L. Jackson and Pulp Fiction which cannot
be described without one another. I can by far tell that Alex is
my best hire at Namshi and Rocket Internet. He has been super
involved and helpful in establishing the development team’s spirit.
Coming from a strong and cutting-edge open source expertise he shares
and more often owns the understanding of how Namshi’s technology
should look like in the future. Being an outstanding developer from
the beginning, he progressively took more responsibility to the extent
that with my leaving in the next weeks, he can take over almost all
responsibilities seamlessly which I appreciate a lot.

Halil Koklu, former CTO @ Namshi (2013)

Alex is one of the best programmers I ever met, His approach to solving
OOP problems is incredible. Hungry of knowledge, he’s able to apply
concept that he just learned and has excellent analysis even in cases
of high stress.
The experience he managed to gain – despite his youg age – is amazing.
It was a pleasure working with him especially on open source projects,
I hope that in the future there will be another team in which we can work
together.

David Funaro, Sr. software engineer @ Dnsee (2012)

Alessandro has been my source of knowledge and inspiration in the last
two years. He is a person full of passion and he knows how to make you
want to learn, or increase it.
Although young he has a very deeply knowledge of everything related
to software architecture and development processes. He’s able to convey
knowledge only staying by his side.
I’m really glad to met him and have had the pleasure to work together.
He’s always in the forefront of everything related to programming.
I really hope to work side by side with him again.

Fabio Cicerchia, software engineer @ Dnsee (2012)

Last but not least, I am an Open Source enthusiast and I try to
release code as soon as I get the chance to, either in my
spare time or while working on
some interesting projects at the office.

I am usually very open to random people hitting my inbox, so feel
free to drop me a line at [email protected]!